HUGH’S WAR ON WASTE

BBC1, 9pm

Coffee cups have completely taken over Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s life recently.

He has even been spotted driving around London in a battle bus covered in coffee cups.

This is all part of the chef and presenter’s latest mission – which you may have already heard about. He’s targeting coffee shop giants Starbucks, Costa and Caffe Nero for a recycling scandal that most of us never knew existed. In the UK, we throw away 2.5 billion of the ­cardboard cups every year, but did you know they can’t actually be recycled?

Well, virtually none are recyclable – 99% are sent to landfill or ­incinerators. So, there we are, ­dutifully chucking our cups into a recycling bin, feeling ever so pleased with ourselves for making an effort to save the planet – but it’s all a big con.

“These high-street giants aren’t as green as they seem!” exclaims Hugh, who has recently become a ­champion for waging war on waste.

Last year he was accosting people in supermarkets about the millions of tonnes of food we trash every day.

And the incredible result has been new supermarket food lines of “wonky veg”, meaning farmers don’t have to bin fields of produce just because the potatoes don’t stack up in a beauty contest.

“Waste is the one environmental disaster we can all do something about,” he says.

Back to the cups, and Hugh is hoping to have the same success by confronting the big corporations – but they seem a little shy about coming forward (hence the bus).

Meanwhile, Hugh has another target too – packaging. You know when you order a DVD and it arrives in a box the size of a small sofa?

Amazon have recently vowed to stop using over-sized packaging. Could Hugh’s visit to them have helped?

Tune in for this eye-opening and admirable documentary about a big British issue.